Eight Ghosts Read online

  Mr Lanyard frowned and said, ‘He thinks so? What crime does he accuse you of?’ and as the question was being put to Fraser by the translator, Mr Lanyard jerked his hand as though he had been touched. He looked behind him, looked down, in fact.

  ‘Is there something troubling you, Mr Lanyard?’ asked Mr Clark.

  Mr Lanyard touched his fingers and stared at the bare floorboards.

  ‘No, my lord,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have anything else to ask the defendant?’ said Mr Clark.

  Mr Lanyard wiped his brow with the sleeve of his robe. ‘Might I request that the floor is cleared, my lord?’ he said. ‘The smell is stifling.’

  ‘The floor will be swept at the end of the session, Mr Lanyard,’ said Mr Clark. ‘If you are unwell, then I shall adjourn.’

  ‘A moment, my lord,’ said Mr Lanyard and sat down heavily in his chair and drank the cup of water I poured for him. But he had taken no more than a mouthful before he jerked his arm as if he had been squeezed on the elbow and soaked the papers in front of him.

  ‘What is it, Mr Lanyard?’ I asked, but he was looking behind his chair.

  Voices began to murmur around the room and Mr Clark struck his gavel on the block.

  ‘Mr Lanyard,’ he said. ‘I ask again. Are you unwell, sir?’

  ‘Who is it?’ said Mr Lanyard. ‘There is someone here. My hand.’

  He held it at arm’s length, as though it did not belong to him. His palm and his fingers dripped with the same slurry that coated Fraser’s shins.

  The defendant and the witnesses looked at one another and the noise in the courtroom increased enough for Mr Clark to sound his gavel a second time.

  Mr Lanyard twitched again and now his other hand was soiled.

  ‘What is this trickery?’ he said and started from his chair as quickly as his body would allow, his eyes moving as though he was watching the progress of a wasp around the courtroom. He let out a cry and crouched by one of the windows with his hands over his ears as if some loud, piercing noise had suddenly erupted.

  Every man in the courtroom was on his feet now, Mr Clark’s demands for silence having no effect. Fraser, Cameron and Gordon argued as the bailiffs kept them separated. And through it all Mr Lanyard sobbed like a child, and was still curled up, mired in his robes, when the courtroom had been cleared and Doctor McEwan arrived.

  Back at McEwan’s house, Mr Lanyard still seemed agitated, and even with his clothes taken off to be washed and in a clean nightshirt he insisted that he could still smell the dungeon. And blood too. As if it were a vapour in the room.

  McEwan called the servants to fill the copper bath and urged Mr Lanyard to try and scrub the stench from his skin. Though it was doubtful he was listening. His mind was as unsettled as his eyes, which roved from one corner to the next.

  ‘There is someone here,’ he said, ‘as there was in the courtroom.’

  ‘It is only Mr Gregory and I,’ said McEwan. ‘No one else.’

  ‘There is another,’ said Mr Lanyard.

  ‘Try to sleep, sir,’ said McEwan. ‘And in the morning you will find yourself much relieved of these thoughts, I’m sure.’

  We left him to rest and went down to eat, although none of us were hungry. Perrin and Willis barely touched their food and went out into the garden for some air.

  ‘He will be well again,’ McEwan said. ‘I’m sure he will regain his vigour.’

  But I knew that they were words of reassurance only and that he could not imagine Mr Lanyard being able to continue. The man was utterly exhausted in his body and in his mind.

  McEwan was turning in for the night and halfway up the stairs when we heard Mr Lanyard calling for us and the capuchin screeching. It had got loose from its cage.

  The doctor was first to reach the room and I and the two servants followed, finding the animal clinging to Mr Lanyard’s back. Each time we tried to get hold of its arm or leg or tail, it would dart out of reach and fix its claws in a different bit of flesh, causing Mr Lanyard to cry out in pain. His nightshirt was already torn and spotted with blood and his unwigged scalp raked with scratches.

  I suppose it was the noise of Perrin and Willis coming into the room that finally drove the creature to leap down onto the floor and make for the open door. But before it could escape, Perrin threw a blanket over it and then he and Willis and the servants stamped until it was dead.

  While the bundle was removed, McEwan attended to Mr Lanyard’s wounds, making all efforts to keep his hands steady. When he had finished, I took him down into the dining chamber and sent a servant to fetch him some brandy. McEwan looked overcome with remorse but I assured him that he was not at fault. Animals were animals. They knew no better. He replied that he could not blame the two clerks for wishing to defend their master, and that the creature could not have been allowed to run wild in the house, but the capuchin had not meant to attack Mr Lanyard as he slept. It had been drawn there to see off someone else.

  ‘An intruder?’ I said.

  ‘You may call it that,’ replied McEwan and drank his brandy and said no more.

  It wasn’t until some months later, when the trials were over and Mr Lanyard’s replacement had sent dozens more men to swing on the forthcoming market days, that Doctor McEwan wrote to properly express his regret, not only about what had happened but for the lurid rumours that had begun to attach themselves to my old employer. Time had allowed his thoughts to settle and, on the proviso that I shared it with no one else, he offered his account of what he had seen in Mr Lanyard’s room, what he suspected the capuchin had been frightened of that night and for many months before. He had only seen it for a moment before the sheets were disturbed by the frenzy of the animal’s assault, but there had been someone lying next to Mr Lanyard. He could swear to that, even if he could not be sure who it was.

  It at least looked like the boy he’d seen pulled out of the dungeon one night in the winter. A pale sheaf of bones. No more than eleven or twelve. Recruited with his father, who had been killed in the siege.

  McEwan said that the soldier who had called him into the keep knew that he ought to have disposed of the child, but compassion had got the better of him and he wanted the doctor to at least confirm that he was dead. And he was, McEwan wrote. He had been for days. But not from some sickness brought on by the noxious air in the dungeon or the fetid pool that was knee deep with what the men had excreted day after day.

  The guard had told him that at the very back of the cell there was some opening through which rainwater trickled, and that the men would take it in turns to lick the stones. It seemed that this boy had spent too long at the wall and in the dark the others had broken his skull, and then drowned him.

  Nadine was returning from a day shift at the hospital when it happened for the first time. A fug of sweat and cigarettes and damp coats on the top deck of a No. 23, then a windy walk high over the river on that fine white rainbow of cast iron, stopping at the central point, as she always did, to lean over the railings and pretend for a few moments that she was airborne like the ravens that played out there in the updraught.

  Past the laundrette, the bookies and The Trawlerman, then dipping into the Co-operative for a Telegraph and the pint of milk her mother-in-law would almost certainly have forgotten to buy.

  She crossed the cool, tiled hall of The Mansions and stepped into the lift. A ring of light appeared around her fingertip as she pressed the button for the fifth floor. The doors closed, the slack in the cable was taken up and she rose through the building.

  Halfway between the second and third floors she tasted something bitter at the back of her throat. Her legs became unsteady and she had to grip the metal rail to hold herself upright. The brushed steel of the lift’s wall, the emergency sign, her own hands, none of them seemed real. There was a loud, sparking crackle and the world shrank to a single bright point, like a television screen being turned off. She floated briefly in absolute darkness, then light and noise flooded back and she was s
tanding, not in the lift, but at the side of a busy road looking at a row of dirty red-brick houses in the rain. The street was full of people, running, shouting, crying. One woman simply stood and stared into the distance, one dropped bags of shopping at her feet, a tin of Ambrosia creamed rice rolling into the gutter through spilt flour turning milky on the wet pavement.

  A white and sky-blue panda car screeched to a halt at the kerb beside her and a policeman got out. ‘Nadine Pullman?’

  She was too shocked to reply, shocked that she was visible, shocked that someone knew her name, that she was not just looking at this scene but a part of it.

  ‘Get in.’ She didn’t move. ‘I’m serving you with a B 47 notice, now sodding get into the car or I swear by Almighty God . . .’

  She got into the car. The policeman jumped back into the driving seat and gunned the engine. A woman in an olive gaberdine grabbed the wing mirror and screamed for help. They roared away from the kerb and she tumbled backwards, holding the ripped-off mirror in her hands.

  The car tilted and squealed round the corners. A zigzagging Bedford truck came close to hitting them.

  ‘What’s happening?’ It was her voice but it wasn’t her voice.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think is happening?’

  They crested a hill and skidded into a small lane. ‘Out!’ He left the key in the ignition. Three men were running up a concrete staircase built into a high grass bank. One of them was wearing a butcher’s apron. She could hear sirens. ‘Move!’ She tripped and lost a shoe. The policeman grabbed her arm and dragged her up the steps, scraping her ankles and ripping her stockings. He pulled her through a thick double door into a crowded entryway then let her drop. A man and a woman ran up the steps behind them waving cream certificates with red seals.

  A bald man in spectacles barked, ‘Last two!’ and as they crossed the threshold he swung the heavy door shut and it rang like a gong. He locked it with quarter-turns of the levers at its four corners.

  There was another sparking crackle, everything shrank to a similar bright point, and after a few seconds of darkness Nadine found herself lying on the floor of the lift. How long had she been away? Seconds? Minutes? The door was open and Mr Kentridge, from flat seventeen was staring down at her. ‘Are you unwell, Mrs Pullman?’

  She got slowly to her feet, explaining that it was her time of the month and that this sometimes made her sick and light-headed. ‘I need to go and sit down.’

  He held up his hands, not wanting to continue a conversation on this subject. She walked to the door of the flat, steadying herself against the wall then turned to make sure that he had entered the lift and descended.

  Martin’s mother was asleep on the yellow sofa, eyes closed, head resting against the antimacassar. Bennie was dozing in her lap, thumb in his mouth. She wanted a cup of tea but didn’t trust her shaking hands with the kettle, the matches and the gas. Instead she opened the window and lit a Kensitas. The sun was starting to go down and lights were coming on, the dark buildings turning slowly into advent calendars.

  The panic in the streets, the green metal door, the airlock. There was no doubt about it. Mr Kentridge suspected nothing, that was some consolation. She massaged her forehead as if the problem were nothing more than a headache. From miles away she heard the sad song of a ferry clearing the harbour. That unforgettable vision of her uncle’s final minutes, so clear she forgot sometimes that she had not witnessed them with her own eyes, the neighbours dragging him out of the cottage and into the little strip of woodland beside the railway. She had seen him a couple of days before the end, raving about sinks and fire orders and black holes. Her aunt’s desperate desire to save him warring with the knowledge that the fight was already lost. ‘There’s nothing more that we can do, Nadine. Please. We need to get away from here.’ Hoping that the doctors would reach him first. Though who knew which fate was worse.

  ‘Mummy . . .?’ Bennie was waking.

  They said that if you’d been there once then you were lost. Though who would be foolish enough to broadcast their good luck if they had visited the other world and come back merely scorched?

  ‘Mummy . . .?’

  She cooked a lamb and carrot stew. She remembered and forgot and remembered, every occasion a jug of iced water down her spine. Edith complained about her hip. She heard herself being sympathetic and was surprised at the skill with which she dissembled. Bennie was teething. She rubbed clove oil on his gums. What would happen to him? Not just the absence of a mother but the taint of having had this mother in particular.

  Martin returned just after seven. Nadine hoped he would sense her distress but he was preoccupied with some difficulty at the workshop involving a three-piece suite and an unpaid bill. After supper he played cribbage with his mother and piggybacks with Bennie then put him to bed. The three of them listened to Joan Sutherland on the radio.

  She lay under the covers unable to sleep, Martin dead to the world beside her. So gentle for such a big man. She’d seen him lift a car so that the wheel could be changed. They’d met at a coffee concert in the Wellesley Room, Martin absurd in his undersized suit. Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ before the interval, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge after. Two brilliant violins poorly served. He could protect her. She had thought it before they’d even spoken.

  She had two fathers. One was sober, one was drunk. The first became the second when the sun went down. The beatings weren’t the worst. It was the waiting in between which ate away at her. She brought Martin home for tea and Martin held her father’s eye for the most uncomfortable ten seconds of her life and her father never touched her again. But now? This wasn’t a drunken father. This wasn’t a flat tyre and a missing jack.

  Above her in the gloom the plaster cornices turned slowly monstrous.

  Three uneventful days encouraged the hope that she’d had a very narrow escape, the burden of her terrible secret growing slowly lighter as she changed dressings and emptied bedpans. The man who had fallen from the scaffolding two months earlier took his first steps and they threw a party.

  On the fourth day she was sitting on one of the benches outside the staff canteen, next to the blackthorn hedge which half-hid the boiler plant. She was eating the mustard and potted meat sandwich she had made that morning and wrapped in greaseproof paper so that she could carry it in her handbag. Again, the bitter taste, the sparking crackle, the darkness and suddenly she was holding an exercise book bearing a black crown and the words ‘AWDREY LOG: Supplied for the Public Service HMSO Code 28-616’. She could smell sweat and human excrement. Mounted on the wall to her right was a grid of tiny wooden boxes, the kind a school librarian might use for storing index cards. One was labelled ‘DEAD’, another ‘CONFIRMED’.

  Three men in pigeon-blue military jackets were leaning over a broad table. Behind them was a wall of Perspex on which a big map of the country had been gridded and subdivided. She was in a room not much larger than a squash court. It had no windows. One of the men looked up. His stubble and his red eyes suggested that he had neither slept nor shaved for several days. ‘Well . . .?’

  ‘Two new blasts. Blast one: 50 miles, bearing 152 degrees.’ The words were coming out of her mouth but she had no idea what they meant. ‘6 to 8 megatons. RAF Scampton.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said the man. ‘And the second blast . . .?’

  ‘The second . . .’ Her mind was blank.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, we do not have all day.’

  His colleague turned to him, a gangly man with a wizard’s beard who was clearly not used to wearing a uniform. ‘I fear that we have all the time in the world.’

  ‘Miss Pullman.’ The red-eyed man turned back to Nadine.

  ‘A little kindness would not go amiss,’ said the bearded man.

  ‘Miss Pullman,’ the red-eyed man ignored his colleague, ‘there is limited air. There is limited water. You have a job to do and that is the only reason you are here. Illness is not an option. Mental collapse is not an option.’


  The sparking crackle sounded again and after a short period of darkness she was lying on her back staring up at a blue sky, the blackthorn bush and two worried people gazing down at her. Dr Cairns offered a hand to ease her to her feet. Sister Collins guided her to the bench. Cold sweat and a deep churn in her guts. ‘Nurse Catterick, fetch Nurse Pullman a glass of cold water.’

  It was simply a matter of time now. Her friends and colleagues wouldn’t turn her in, but gossip spread and it only took one person who valued their safety above your life. Dr Peterson had been taken away in a black van, Nurse Nimitz had been taken away, the handsome Trinidadian man with sickle cell had been taken away . . .

  She went home early, bright autumn sun falling on a world to which she no longer belonged. There was a fair in Queen’s Gardens, a chained baby elephant in a nest of straw, painted horses turning, a jaunty pipe organ and the smell of burnt sugar.

  She had no idea what to expect from this point on. They had wiped her uncle from the family record, as if ignorance were a form of protection, and what she heard elsewhere was a tangle of gossip, half-truth and scaremongering. Some said that it was contagious insanity, others that these were echoes of past events, others that they were premonitions of events still to come. The end of the world, some whispered.

  There were no articles in the papers. It was not discussed on the radio or the television. Her lack of interest seemed shameful in retrospect. Not once had she put herself in these shoes. So much suffering and her only thought had been relief that it was happening to someone else.

  She had Bennie on her knee when it happened for a third time. This is the way the ladies ride. Clip-clop, clip-clop . . . Edith had retreated to her room with The Grand Sophy and a mug of cocoa which might or might not have contained a shot of Bowmore, and Bennie was hungry for some of the riotousness that Edith’s age and hip were making increasingly impossible. This is the way the gentlemen ride . . .

  It was quicker this time, more like a doorway than a journey. No bitter taste, just a rapid crackle, Bennie falling backwards out of her grasp, then she was waking from a shallow sleep in a cramped dormitory of eight bunks. Half-submarine, half-boarding school. Her skin was sticky, her hair lank. A woman in uniform was waiting to take her place under the dirty sheet and khaki blanket. The words ‘Royal Observer Corps’ curved over a red aeroplane on her shoulder. Nadine looked down and saw that she had been sleeping in an identical grey-blue uniform. Fifteen other women were climbing out of bed. Fifteen different women were waiting to take their places.